"Wet" means "Climate Change" a.k.a. AGW and thus giant (Giant? Notthe normal size? Is there a radiation scare or did they become giant because of AGW?) spiders changing habitat is a reality.
Just the sort of story that makes the spoofs so believable and if believable someone somewhere will not simply believe but defend that belief if it costs them their life.

On the subject of scary science stories indistinguishable from satire, the vast majority of these are environmentally-related. But on rare occasion you do a get a story which isn't environmentally-related in this category, and there was a good one last year about the universe being destroyed by the act of studying it.

The problem supposedly comes from measuring "dark energy" [not to be confused with the dark energy they sometimes talk about in ghost-hunting TV shows]. The reason this story might be confused with satire is that modern physics does entertain the notion that observing something can change its behaviour, and it is conceivable that some satirist might extend that idea to the whole universe.

However the physicists behind the story appear to be legitimate. Lawrence Krauss appears to be this person:

Krauss was apparently a science policy adviser to Obama at one time, and is also strongly connected with the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists", a group of panicky, left wing scientists that predate the Union of Concerned Scientists, and who are most well known for organising an annual stunt where they arbitrarily decide how close the world is to oblivion in the form of a clock which is set at some number of minutes to midnight. Krauss also wrote a book called "The Physics of Star Trek".

Presumably Krauss wants some areas of cosmology research shut down to avoid the risk of destroying the universe. However I can see a problem - if we are not alone in the universe, then alien civilisations might also be carrying out similar studies and contributing to the destruction of the universe, and there would be no way of warning them.